Quote:
Originally Posted by AR_Six
^ It wasn't that crazy. He's basically saying that people pretty much intuitively decide on things they find morally blameworthy enough to prohibit in a society governed by the rule of law. In his view two of those things are murder and sodomy. That's not a useful moral theory but 99.5% of the population hasn't really put any thought into the foundations for their moral views in any event, so here we are.
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Yes, and as far as it goes that is
sort of true (that moral feelings are intuitive). But using murder as an example transforms his argument into utter nonsense; murder is not something we intuitively believe is wrong, and have "moral feelings" against on that basis: it's wrong according to most ways of schematizing ethics and morality in society--that is, in addition to being "intuitively wrong," it violates the rights of others, contravenes the harm principle, is anti-utilitarian, the list goes on and on.
Two guys having sexy time with each other doesn't do any of that stuff. All that's left is the "intuitive" feeling that Scalia has, and he uses this to ground his support for so-called "anti-sodomy" measures--that is, he uses it to ground his legal support for the policy objective of denouncing that behaviour.
I also think it's fair to ask that he hold himself to a higher reasoning standard than the 99.5% of the population who (you are no doubt right) have moral views that are unexamined from any standpoint other than their intuition.